Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam

Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam

Islamic
theology is mostly un-Islamic and needs extensive reform of a fundamental
nature. It is full of utter nonsense. It is not very much different from what
the extremists believe which is why it can never effectively counter them. To
give you an example, in Islamic theology, kafir has come to mean a non-Muslim
which is not the meaning of the word in the Quran at all. Now if you read the
Quran giving the word such a meaning, and when this word in its various
grammatical forms appears in the Quran more than 300 times, you can imagine the
havoc it plays with the meaning of the Quran! What is the solution? The
solution is to show exactly what meaning the Quran gives to this word with the
help of the Quranic verses. Is that possible? It is possible to very precisely
define what it means and what it does not mean after which the Quran reads very
differently and makes very good sense. With the wrong meaning it sounds
absolutely grotesque. By changing the meaning of one word, the word of God can
be transformed into the word of Satan.....

Sean Illing

Ali A. Rizvi

Neither side
was making that distinction. On the left, people were saying that if you have
any criticism against Islam, then you were a bigot against all Muslims. On the
right, it was like, there are a lot of problematic things in Islamic scripture,
so everyone who is Muslim must be banned, or profiled, or demonized. Both sides
weren't making that distinction between challenging ideas, which has
historically moved societies forward, and demonizing human beings, which only
rip societies apart....

Khalid Baig

The Muslim
world throughout is plagued with the presence of two parallel education systems
Schools, colleges and universities on the one hand and Madaris or Darul Ulooms
on the other. They are parallel in a textbook definition of parallel lines; two
lines that never meet. Together they are tearing the fabric of the Muslim
community by pulling it in opposite directions. In order to understand where we
stand and where we are headed with what we have, it is important to look at how
we ended up where we are now.....

Irfan Husain

Irfan Husain

It’s the last
requirement that’ll be the deal-breaker for most of us. Hands up all those who
have never sinned in their lives. What, no hands? Hang on, I can see several
judges, generals, bureaucrats and businessmen raising their hands at the back.
Thank God we have some honest and upright people living in our midst, or I
would have been very disappointed with the Land of the Pure....

Rima Najjar

Rima Najjar

The one place
in the entire world the Jews were neither discriminated against nor subject to
pogroms was the Muslim world. In fact so much that was the case that when
Christianity came back to power in Spain in Andalusia, in the western extent of
the Islamic empire, when the Muslims left, the Jews left with them, because
they feared the Christian anti-Semitism, which would be unleashed in the wake
of the departure of the Islamic civilization in the West, that’s why so many
Jews are to be found, even today, and were to be found in profusion before the
creation of the state of Israel in countries like Morocco and along the north
African coast, because under the protection of the Muslims, the Jews left
Europe and went to live in N Africa.....

Ayse Arman

Ayse Arman

The first crack
to break the vase was the Supreme Court’s decision “cancelling the civil
marriage restriction before conducting a religious marriage,” in 2015. That is
to say a man and woman could have a religious marriage—and the age of the woman
is not given any importance—she can be the age of a child....

Gurmeet Kanwal

Gurmeet Kanwal

Just when the
Pakistan Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, was engaged in attempts to wrest control
over the country's foreign and security policies from the army, he has been
disqualified from holding office by the Supreme Court on corruption and money
laundering charges ~ for which he is still to be tried....

Khaled Ahmed

Khaled Ahmed

On June 13, a
US drone attack in Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan
killed Abu Bakar Haqqani of the Afghan terrorist Haqqani Network. Since Abu
Bakar Haqqani was killed inside the area administered by Pakistan and not in
the tribal belt, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has threatened an
inter-agency review of his country’s funding and support to Pakistan....

BEST OF BEFORE ARTICLES

Roshan Shah, New Age Islam

The Quran, like
any other text (religious as well as other) can be interpreted in diverse,
often mutually-contradictory, ways. If radical Islamists champion a
violence-driven, politics-centric interpretation of their faith, many Muslim
reformists articulate diametrically different interpretations of Islam, which
are rooted in a quest for peace. What people read into a text depends heavily
on their cultural and ideological baggage....

Shajahan Madampat

Shajahan Madampat

I believe that
the Islam of identity should yield to the Islam of truth. The latter can
coexist with other truths. The former, however, is, by its very nature, belligerent
and bellicose. It is the Islam of war, not the Islam of peace. Two identities
would fight each other, while two truths would cooperate.”

Islam, as an
inclusive faith and as a humane culture, is facing existential threats not from
its arch rivals but from its ardent followers. The solution therefore is to
seek endogenous remedies because, on the one hand, imagining a future beyond
faith is too utopian a dream to achieve and, on the other, like other
traditions, the history and textual corpus of Islam could offer ample resources
to self-rejuvenate and fight the internal decay.....

Ghulam Ghaus Siddiqi, New Age Islam

Ghulam Ghaus Siddiqi, New Age Islam

A good human being is identified as kind even towards his enemies. He does not deprive them of the rights that they deserve as his human counterparts. On A good human being is identified as kind even towards his enemies. He does not deprive them of the rights that they deserve as his human counterparts. He does not punish his enemies any more than would be just, but if possible tries to forgive them. Such was the blessed attribute that the holy prophets of Allah Almighty –including Sheath, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and the final messenger Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon all of them)— brought to the world so as to encourage forgiveness, good treatment and justice towards the entire humanity. .....

Rashid Samnakay, New Age Islam

Just one
feature of the religious/Sharia practice is focused on here; that of couple
seeking reunion in marriage after their ‘final divorce’ has taken place.
This final divorce is the one that is enforced by Quran following
reconciliation of the couple to come together in marriage twice previously,
having gone through two divorces....

Dr. Mohammad Ghitreef, New Age Islam

Dr. Mohammad Ghitreef, New Age Islam

Islam brought
to women their dignity, freedom, justice and equality. It infused in them a
sense of self confidence and a seeking sprite of truth and hunger for knowledge
.That is why in early Islam a woman is seen participating in all the vibrant
social activates, say, learning knowledge, propagating it even teaching men for
that matter, participating even in war zone and political arena. In prophetic
era Hazrat Ayesha as first lady of Islam not only was a great Aalima having
deep knowledge of Quran and Hadith, but was enjoying an expertise in areas of
Arabic poetry, medicine teaching and jurisprudence….

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

This is a
trying time for all the Sufi practitioners and shrine-visitors in India and
Pakistan. First time in the history, Ajmer Sharif--the biggest Sufi shrine in
India--is being used in a large political campaign of the Jami'at Ulema-e-Hind
(JUH), whose key members and religio-politicians declare Sufism
"un-Islamic", yet chose the largest Sufi shrine to organise their
33th annual conference, clearly in an attempt to woo the mainstream
Sufi-oriented Muslims in India….

Rashid Samnakay, New Age Islam

Suffice it to
say that Quran calls for conservation of animal life and therefore has
nominated a long period in which hunting is prohibited so as to give animals
time to recover from the depletion of its population at the hands of mankind.
Therefore, animals being also a community of creation, it is to be
cherished and husbanded sustainably....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

If one is hell bent on arguing that
Islam is the best religion in the world and that
polytheism of the Hindus is a backward and deplorable religious worldview, then
how does this promote peace and tolerance? If he continues to justify that
Islam alone is the saviour of world, then how does this promote peace and mutual
respect? Calling such sermons of a third rate pedant as dialogue militates
against the very idea of a dialogical plural world. Zakir Naik is not
interested in dialogue: he is a fascist demagogue who wants all the world to
convert to his point of view.

His hypocrisy on democracy begins to
unravel the minute he takes recourse to the Quran. There are many passages
within the text to cite in terms of pluralism and tolerance. But to quote the
verse which tells Muslims to be patient and wait for their eventual victory
over the polytheists is perhaps too much. This is not a man who is a believer
in the virtues of secular laws like democracy. This is a man who wants to
unfurl the Islamic flag everywhere, demean and trounce all other religious
traditions. The recourse to democracy and the language of rights are only a
means to an end: that of establishing the supremacy of Islam. ....

Almas Kiran Shamim

A Christian
from Pakistan can use ‘Khuda’; a Zoroastrian from Iran can use ‘Khuda’. This,
by no means, implies that a Muslim from either Pakistan or Iran cannot use
‘Khuda’. When you say that ‘Khuda’ can also mean the Christian God or the Parsi
God or even the Sikh or Hindu God, you are actually trying to say that there IS
a Christian God, a Parsi God, a Sikh God, and a Hindu God besides a Muslim God
Allah.....

Roshan Shah, New Age Islam

​But Badshah Khan’s message is scarcely
limited to Islam. It can help the non-Muslim world to understand the true
greatness of Islam, but more than that, it should help all nations to
understand their own potential for love in action. If Badshah Khan could raise
a nonviolent army out of a people so steeped in violence as the Pathans, there
is no country on earth where it cannot be done.​"​...

Dr. Adis Duderija, New Age Islam

Dr. Adis Duderija, New Age Islam

A Salafi
worldview/epistemology is based on a hermeneutical mechanism central classical
Islamic law which at least, in theory, a
priori privileges the interpretive efforts of the early Muslim
communities (especially the distinguished Companions and the Successors) over
all others. When combined with the other mechanisms explained above a Salafi
worldview/epistemology implies a subscription to an epistemologically
pre-modern episteme that lacks internal hermeneutical mechanisms to incorporate
ethical values and system of ethics that were not prevalent at the time of the
formative and classical periods of Islamic thought into its ethical and legal
canon....

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

This is a tough
time for introspection on part of the Indian Ulema and Islamic scholars. Merely
organising large anti-terrorism conferences will do no service to the
community. Time they combat the exclusivist, xenophobic, misogynistic and
anti-plural religious underpinnings, be they embedded in Salafism, the Saudi
state religion, or any other strain of Islam. Radical Islamism, in any form or
fashion, is not compatible with the secular, pluralistic and democratic Indian
ethos...

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

Muslim leaders
and politicians in India are busy in a crazy competition of organizing
conferences, greater campaigns and processions to protect their ‘right to
triple Talaq’. Countrywide hue and cry is still being heard from the
self-imposed Muslim representatives championing the cause of Tahaffuz-e-Shariat
(protection of Shariah). “Islam is under
attack” is their daily sloganeering in India. But what about the birthplaces of
Islam—Makka and Madina— which suffer the brutal and bloodthirsty attacks?...